G.SKILL is one of the move respected names in the computer industry. Established in 1989 by enthusiasts, they have become one the leading memory module manufacturers. They also have one the most extensive range of computer memory products available. They have 13 different series of desktop memory alone.

Being a RAID 0 setup, one question immediately comes to mind – does it support TRIM? Thankfully, the answer is yes, as well as SCSI UNMAP/IOCTL , so performance won’t degrade over time due to an accumulation of ‘dirty’ blocks.

Not that long ago, adding the Blade to their product stack would have been an impossibility for G.Skill. After being the first to offer a relatively affordable SSD and following up with several strong product ranges, they made the decision to temporarily pull out of the SSD market.

Just stop a moment and look at the headline grabbing numbers proclaimed in the specifications. 2GBs read and write. Something that would require a 4 or 5 drive RAID 0 setup with all the associated setup/cable annoyance and costs involved in that. If that's even remotely backed up by our testing then there is no question about the new king. Let's find out then...

G.Skill’s Phoenix Blade SSD, Combining four of LSI SandForce’s tried-and-tested SF-2281 controllers in RAID 0 with 480 usable gigabytes of 19nm Toshiba MLC NAND, G.Skill is able to quote up to 2000MBps read and write speeds for the Phoenix Blade. That’s about four times faster than the SATA 6Gbps connection’s top limit and outlines why a 4GBps (per direction) PCIe 2.0 x8 connection is deemed necessary.

Obtaining faster-than-SATA speeds on consumer motherboards is possible by jumping straight on to the back of the PCIe backbone connecting CPUs to a motherboards's peripherals. For example, PCIe 3.0, common on today's boards, offers approximately 1GB/s bandwidth per lane and in each direction, meaning a full x16 slot can push close to 16GB/s in both directions. PCIe, then, is effective in lifting the bandwidth lid imposed by SATA.